Towns can't just disappear...or can they? Old maps of the Black Hills are speckled with boomtowns and mining camps that flourished-then faded. Historians aren't even sure where some sizeable communities were located.
Take the case of American City. This town reportedly was located somewhere in or near Spearfish Canyon. Time and floodwaters have removed all traces of the town, and nothing else is known about its location.
Early newspaper accounts tell us there were three adjoining villages known as Beaver City, Quartz City, and New Berlin. These hamlets were home to 150 miners. The best guess is that the remains of these ghost towns are somewhere between Nemo and Roubaix Lake.
These and over 500 ghost towns are listed in the interesting book Black Hills Ghost Towns, by Hugh Lambert. More than a dozen of the towns have no known location.
Canyon Springs was a stage coach relay station somewhere east of Four Corners, Wyoming. It was at Canyon Springs in 1878 that outlaws ambushed a stage and its cargo of $100,000 in Homestake gold. Three of the robbers died in a hail of gunfire from Homestead guards. But at least two of the bandits escaped with the loot, though in their hasty retreat they dropped one of the gold bars. Another of the gold bars eventually turned up in Iowa. The rest was never found. The location of that gold, and of Canyon Springs, has been a topic of debate ever since.
Another puzzler is the wild railhead town named Whoop-up, which seems to have been located near Newcastle. We know only that Whoop-up lasted just one year. Then it was moved lock, stock and barrel to nearby Tubb Town.
Postage records show the Centennial City's post office served 52 people. But where was Centennial City? The whereabouts of Saratoga is also in question. A very inaccurate map from 1883 shows Saratoga southwest of Sturgis, roughly where Boulder Park is today.
These and other examples prove that Black Hill's history is a fascinating and yet unfinished mosaic.
10/01/03